Dedicated to the Proposition

Can any nation so conceived long endure?

The Newfoundland tricolor, flag of no nation

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The last two weeks of July my wife and I spent in Newfoundland. I heartily recommend a trip there to anyone who loves beautiful scenery, friendly people and fresh cod —and who doesn’t mind cool weather and rain. We did some hiking, some kayaking, gawked at whales and laughed at puffins, spotted a couple of icebergs, visited some Viking ruins, listened to a little music, got screeched in, even met up with some actor friends from Stratford now residing there. The island is something like a cross between Iceland, Ireland and Maine: geographic isolation, rocky coastline, wet climate, culturally- and economically-important fisheries, geological distinctiveness, Gaelic cultural heritage. If that’s the kind of thing you like, you’ll definitely like it.

It also has a lengthy history as a separate country from Canada, something I didn’t know until I arrived there. As a British colony, Newfoundland and Labrador was granted self-government in 1832, responsible government in 1854, and Dominion status in 1926. That’s not a terribly different timeline from Canada’s incremental journey to practical independence. Newfoundland lost its independence though during the 1930s, reverting to a crown colony as a consequences of economic decline triggered by the Great Depression (which threatened its ability to repay its war debts) and the acute unpopularity of its corrupt government. Subsequently, it entered into confederation with Canada in 1949—something Newfoundlanders had rejected twice in the 19th century—an outcome Britain sought because it feared the alternative was a formal or practical takeover by the Americans, who would not countenance outright independence because they would not risk an island so strategic for air transport between Europe and America falling into unfriendly hands. The union with Canada was confirmed by a referendum which has always lived under a cloud of suspicion, at a minimum for having been unduly influenced to deliver the desired result, and maximally for having been rigged outright.

I learned all this from a documentary series that a friend helped produce which we saw while on the trip, a series based on the book, Don’t Tell the Newfoundlanders. Having some historical perspective on British imperial shenanigans elsewhere, I confess to not being nearly as scandalized by the revelations of the series as the filmmakers surely intended, but I did find the story fascinating and compelling, to the point that, over the course of the trip, I began unthinkingly to refer to Newfoundland as a “country” rather than an island or a province, and was delighted to discover that it has its own tricolor distinct from the official provincial flag. I could easily be roused by the romance of an independent Newfoundland if such were in the offing.

Of course, the very idea is daft. Newfoundland would be a tiny country, quite unable to defend itself against either military or economic aggressors. It’s far too small to be an optimal currency area, and it depends too much on international trade for basic necessities to adopt a nationalist trade policy. It is already suffering from steady outmigration and rural depopulation; were it not for large numbers of immigrants coming from outside Canada, the province would be in outright demographic crisis. Independence would not stem the former trend, but might well disrupt the latter—and if it didn’t, what would it mean for Newfoundland to be a country if that country’s population were then to change radically in a short time? What, then, would independence be preserving? But to me, none of this wisdom dimmed the romance of “what if?” one whit. A world in which Newfoundland is a country just seems more charming than a world in which that is practically impossible.

I’ve been musing in this irrealistic manner as I brood about our era’s nationalist revival, which oppresses my heart with dread rather than swelling it with joyful anticipation. Some time ago, in a pre-October 7th piece of mine about the changing meaning of Zionism, I offered as an aside that “nationalism is an inherently illiberal ideology.” That assertion got quite a bit of pushback, since, after all, Garibaldi was a liberal, Kossuth was a liberal—indeed, the overall thrust of 19th century nationalism was liberal, to the point where it’s not unusual to hear the argument that nationalism and liberalism are in fact natural partners. Both are ideologies that aim to liberate people from unjust oppression, and both profess belief in equality and the sovereignty of the individual. It may go too far to argue either that liberalism requires nationalism, but surely nationalism can’t be an inherently illiberal ideology given their repeated historical conjunction. Can it?

Yes, I do think it can, and all my practical cautions about Newfoundland as a country points to why. As far as politics goes, Newfoundland itself is overwhelmingly liberal, and I can understand why a liberal might cheer the idea of Newfoundland taking back its identity and independence—claiming the full share of profit from its offshore oil resources, taking proper care to restore its fisheries, etc. But preserving that independence would require high walls and Spartan sacrifice, a determination to reject in order to protect. Those just aren’t what liberalism is about, and so nationalism, to achieve its aims, must place those aims above the values that liberalism cherishes.

But I want to take the opportunity of a trio of recent pieces by John Ganz, Brett Stephens and Matt Yglesias to broaden and deepen the point. Each of them in different ways is grappling with the fact that, regardless of whether nationalism can be liberal, the actually existing populist nationalism currently rising globally is profoundly illiberal, and they are all wondering what to do about that fact consistent with the goal of sustaining liberal democracy as a thing. Yglesias thinks Democratic politicians (and their small-d counterparts in other countries) simply need to pander to voters’ more conservative views on a host of issues and on immigration specifically, because while a more restrictionist policy mix isn’t economically optimal it also isn’t the end of the world in the way that authoritarianism is. Stephens goes further, implicitly arguing that immigration policies that are likely produce meaningful demographic change should require explicit popular approval—perhaps in the form of a referendum—lest voters conclude that the government is aiming to dissolve the people and elect a new one. Ganz, going in a different direction, calls the incipient blood-and-soil nationalism of the National Conservatives fundamentally un-American—itself a nationalist rhetorical gesture that implies that America’s own nationalism is or should be distinctly liberal.

I think all of us who want to preserve liberalism from the illiberal nationalist challenge need to grapple with the difficulty of doing so. The problem is that the illiberal nationalists are raising questions of political legitimacy, and liberalism has difficulty answering these because liberalism is distinctly weak as a legitimating ideology.

What do I mean by a legitimating ideology? Well, let’s think about pre-modern states. Europe’s monarchies depended for their legitimacy on two ideas: on the hereditary principle (monarchs own their territories, and owners can pass on their property to their descendants) and the mystical idea of the monarch as the father of his subjects. As a method of choosing good leadership, hereditary monarchy leaves a lot to be desired, but one thing it does have going for it is that both the hereditary principle and the idea of fatherhood are readily comprehensible and relatable by just about everyone. Democracy and republicanism, ancient or modern, meanwhile, have their own readily-comprehensible legitimating ideology. Decisions that affect the polis should be made by the polis, either directly or through representatives chosen by the polis. Whereas in a monarchy the king is sovereign, in a democracy the people are (and in a republic the class represented in republican councils are), and their representatives are the equivalent of the ministers hired by a king to advise him on wise policy. Democracy and republicanism have their own practical problems, but their legitimating ideology is also relatively simple to understand.

“Liberalism” by contrast originates the state in an imaginary agreement among atomized individuals such as never existed, then posits that the state came into being for a singular purpose—protecting people’s individual rights—which in turn imposes limits on the state itself. It therefore calls the state’s actions legitimate or illegitimate based not primarily on the source of the state’s authority (is the monarch the true heir; was the government duly elected), but rather on how and to what end that authority is wielded. If a monarch governs illiberally, trampling on the rights on the people, liberalism provides a justification for rebellion or revolution. But by the same token, if the people decide to empower illiberal forces that would violate their own rights—often primarily in order to deny them to a disfavored portion thereof—liberalism provides a justification for resistance to any duly-elected government that might act in such an illiberal fashion. Liberalism even provides justifications for the rejection of the will of the people by officials of the state itself; this is the purpose of constitutionalizing lists of fundamental rights, for example.

The legitimacy of all this is hard to understand if you don’t already believe in liberalism as an ideology. For that reason, liberalism has a natural tendency to empower as a kind of quasi-sovereign clerisy those who are particularly nimble at explicating the intricacies of liberal thought, even to the point of traversing fundamental tenets of liberalism in liberalism’s own name, as European officials increasingly do with ever more draconian restrictions on free speech and political expression in the name of fighting illiberal political movements. This is the “postliberal democracy” that Stephens talks about in his piece, which should probably have some other moniker since it is so often explicitly undemocratic in its operation and acts in the name of liberal values even when it acts illiberally. In any event, I think the emergence of this tendency within liberalism, and a more general affinity for rule by a credentialed “natural aristocracy” is more natural (though not inevitable) than most self-professed liberals are likely to acknowledge.

“Nationalism” by contrast is a lot easier to understand as a legitimating ideology than liberalism is, which isn’t necessarily a good thing, certainly not if you believe in liberal values. What nationalism claims is that a legitimate government is one that represents and embodies “the people” as a preexisting, culturally unified collective. Of course, there is no such thing as a culturally unified collective, anymore than there actually was a state of nature or the atomized human beings posited by liberalism. So actually existing nationalist movements aim to create such groups out of empirically disparate parts that could have been divided into ever smaller and smaller fragments had one desired to do so. Italian nationalism, for example, didn’t aim to “liberate” a dozen or more states representing the incredible variety of cultures between the Alps and the Mediterranean; rather, it aimed to create “Italians” out of Piedmontese and Sicilians who didn’t look alike, eat the same foods or even speak the same language, but who, together, could be “free” to chart their own “national” destiny.

There’s a circularity, in other words, to the identity-formation that nationalists engage in—but what they are circling is identity, a process of establishing who is “in” and who is “out” in the definition of “the people,” and for nationalists this process never really ends because the definition of “the people” can always be redefined to justify their continued rule. So yes, actually existing nationalisms have, from time to time, embraced liberal values, but just as there is an inherent tension between liberalism and democracy (notwithstanding that “liberal democracy” is a thing), there is an inherent tension between nationalism and liberalism, because that assertion that you are only part of “the people” if you have a particular identity—one that nationalists get to define—is itself inherently illiberal.

This is why the alliance of nationalists and liberals has generally been something that doesn’t last much beyond the formation of the nation-state. Up to that point, nationalists and liberals alike may favor the creation of a new, liberally-conceived state to represent and protect the rights of a people who are subject to foreign rule and/or monarchical oppression. But once independence is achieved and the state is established, the goal posts shift and liberalism and nationalism point in different directions, with nationalists aiming to use the state in illiberal ways to “create” the people as it conceives them to be (often by violence), while liberals aim to use the state in ways that (from a nationalist perspective) threaten to dissolve the people as a collective entity entirely. Indeed, with the formation of the European Union, liberals have wound up advocating for reversing the process of independent state-formation entirely in favor of submergence into a liberal supra-national structure.

In our day, because of this perceived split between a liberal political and cultural establishment and “the people,” nationalists have increasingly succeeded in claiming the mantle of democratic legitimacy even in situations where they have fallen short of actually commanding electoral majorities, because while liberals (or coalitions thereof) can win a majority of the votes, only nationalists seem to mean what they say when they speak for “the people.” At a deep level, liberalism just doesn’t provide any real way of deciding who “the people” are, but democracy inherently depends on such a definition because “the people” are sovereign in the democratic scheme, so if you don’t know who they are you can’t know whether a given government is legitimate. The nationalist heuristic for answering that question may be circular and capricious heuristic, but it is a heuristic nonetheless. So once the question of “who is the people, really?” comes to be explicitly contested, all liberals can generally do is say “that’s not a legitimate question to ask”—which, needless to say, is not a winning argument.

That’s where we are today, and that's the deep problem I see with Yglesias’s otherwise entirely sensible suggestion that, to save democracy, liberals should simply pander to the actual sentiments of the people on questions like immigration—sentiments that are fundamentally conservative and culturally-driven and hence ripe for exploitation by ideological nationalists—so that voters don’t feel the need to turn to populist nationalists with authoritarian tendencies to get their preferred policies enacted. Obviously, actually-existing liberal politicians and parties can do and at various times have done exactly that. But I’m not sure that liberalism as an ideological tendency has the internal resources to justify such a move, and given the deep hole liberals are in on this question I worry that may limit their ability to pander convincingly. Liberals can perfectly well say “we must secure the border” or that “immigrants must obey the law”—there’s nothing liberal about ignoring the law. But that doesn’t speak to what the law should be. The citizenry of a great many Western countries now harbor a profound and justified distrust of liberal parties (including conservative parties that are not explicitly nationalist) on immigration and, more generally, the question of national identity. In that context, it probably isn’t enough to pander; you need to seem like you believe what you are saying. How can liberals achieve that?

A common answer is that liberals need to stand for something called “civic nationalism” which affirms some kind of common, collective identity, but declines to find that identity in blood-and-soil nationalist myths. But what is this “civic nationalism” that is so often spoken of? To a German, or an Italian, what does it mean to say that what unites us, what constitutes our collective identity, is some kind of civic commitment? How is it distinguished from the civic commitments that bind any other national community—and if it cannot be so distinguished, then in what way is it German or Italian in the first place?

One might reply that whatever the situation is for Germans or Italians, Americans do have such a civic nationalism—indeed, we don’t really have anything else to hold us together, since our blood didn’t spring from this soil, and we know it didn’t. This is what Ganz is alluding to when he talks about the National Conservatives being “un-American” in their nationalism, and it’s what prompts the title of this post, which comes, of course, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Like Ganz, I will quote the text in full:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The speech is one of the most extraordinary pieces of political rhetoric ever penned, simultaneously rousing and contemplative, forceful and philosophically profound. It’s a piece of American civic scripture, and specifically the key scripture for those who believe that America is a fundamentally “propositional nation” which is to say: a nation defined by belief in the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. If there is such a thing as “liberal nationalism,” it’s bound to look something like this, a definition of the nation itself in ideologically liberal terms. So those who hold to that view owe it to themselves to give it a close reading, because I think that reading goes only partway to supporting their contention.

America, per Lincoln, was conceived in liberty, which is to say that we, as a nation, did not exist prior to 1776. Before we declared our independence from Britain, we were something other than or less than a true nation; it was only that Declaration, and its fulfillment through a successful war and the ratification of the Constitution, that made us a nation at all. We may or may not be unique, but it is certainly distinctive that we, as a nation, cannot believe Plato’s noble lie of having risen spontaneously from the soil of our homeland, but rather know that the land was ours before we were the land’s, and that we have come to be a nation through an act of conscious and freely-chosen conception as such.

At its very moment of conception, Lincoln says, this nation was dedicated to a proposition, laid out in the Declaration that conceived us, that all men are created equal. Lincoln undoubtedly used the word “dedicated” because his own task for which he wrote the speech was to dedicate a battlefield cemetery, but word choice can have profound implications. In this case, it means that Lincoln isn’t saying here what America is, but what America is for. A comparison might be made to the mother of the biblical Samson, who dedicated her unborn son to be a Nazarite in life at the instruction of an angel, or to the mother of the biblical Samuel, who dedicated her son to priestly service before he was even conceived. The children were not sired by a divinity; their origins are normal and human like anyone else’s; but they are going somewhere special. It is the difference between identity and destiny. Applying that distinction to the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln was not defining Americans as “people who believe that all men are created equal,” which would imply that people who don’t believe that proposition are effectively written out of the lists of the American people, while people who do believe it are spiritually American wherever they happen to live. Rather, he is saying that, whatever we may believe individually, we were conceived as a nation for a purpose, a purpose defined by that proposition.

Lincoln was speaking in the middle of the Civil War, and Lincoln’s peroration at the end calls for a rededication to the cause of that war, and to the promise of a new birth of freedom. The cause of the war, after all, was slavery, and the South’s determination to maintain the slave system, which, they felt, required explicitly implicating the entirety of the union in its defense and even expansion, and the definition of entire categories of human beings as inherently ineligible for membership in the American people. But while that was the cause of the war, the cause for which the war was fought was not the end of slavery but the preservation of the Union, which is as much as to say it was being fought to keep the people who believed that Black people could never be citizens—in other words, who explicitly rejected the proposition to which this nation was dedicated—as part of the American people, rather than let them go and establish a new birth of slavery in their own nation while the remainder of the Union pursued a different and more liberal course.

That’s quite an irony when you think about it, but it’s an essential one to the cause of liberal nationalism, if one can exist. What Lincoln was saying, in the speech and by prosecuting the war, was that the American people existed, and that the South had no right unilaterally to cause that people to cease to exist. America was not just a political arrangement among sovereign states who could decide to dissolve it at will; we were a people, just like the preamble to the Constitution says. But we became a people because of our dedication to that proposition—because absent that dedication (at the start of the Declaration of Independence), we had no adequate justification for separating ourselves unilaterally from Britain and from the British monarchy. The blood-and-soil nationalist myth was simply nonsense applied to Americans in 1776—we were just a bunch of British subjects who’d gotten used to governing ourselves who, in a fit of pique, decided to rebel against our rightful sovereign. Absent liberal political theory, we may have had legitimate grievances, but no basis for claiming the right to dissolve the political bands which had connected us with King George III. Similarly, the South had no right to dissolve their bonds with the United States absent a liberal justification, which they manifestly lacked.

So does that mean that, to be a good American today, you must believe all the self-evident truths outlined in the Declaration of Independence? My answer is: no. Why? Because if that were the case, then the Confederates were not only rebels but heretics against the national religion, and what were we doing trying to keep them inside the country? Nonetheless, to be an America is, as a matter of historical fact, for the Declaration of Independence to have been the basis for our existence as a nation. Frederick Douglass may have been right or wrong in calling it the ringbolt to the chain of our nation’s destiny, but to let go of it would be a momentously transformative historical act, one that would have to be recognized as such. For a nationalist to choose cavalierly to discard so fundamental a part of our national inheritance, of our collective history, should make them mockable to obscurity.

But that’s the ground for mockery: the fact that it is an essential part of our inheritance and of our collective history, things that matter or should matter to nationalists. A civic nationalism divorced from, ignorant of or worse dismissive of that inheritance and that history is doomed, no matter how well-versed it is in the liberal catechism. Cosmopolitanism is also particularism; America may in some sense have a special mission, may be a gift to the world, an almost-chosen people—there’s certainly no harm in thinking so—but it is also a specific place, with a specific history, and conceiving of ourselves as part of that history, connected to it and adding to it, not whitewashing or erasing it, is what makes us Americans, spiritually speaking. Liberals aren’t just going to have to talk that way; they’re going to have to believe that way, to speak no other way, if they want to have a prayer of reclaiming the ability to say to those who would define our country in narrower terms: no, these are also Americans, and these others could be too.

As for Newfoundland, when we were in St. John’s we visited their “national” museum, The Rooms, which, among other things, told the history of the island, and in so doing was assiduous about distinguishing and valorizing all the various different strains that contributed to Newfoundland’s history, making an effort to do so in their own terms, the Irish and the Innu and everyone else, including redefining a traditional Newfoundland term—livyers—which properly means someone who lives there year-round as opposed to only coming for seasonal fishing labor—to be a presumably less-politicized neologism for White settlers. That effort, along with the demurral to weave the various threads into a coherent single tapestry, struck as, more than anything, quintessentially Canadian, suggesting that confederation took, after all.

Whether that particular variety of liberal nationalism—more pluribus than unum—can long endure, I don’t know. But I certainly hope it does.